When Hammer woke, roused by some foreign sound in the distance, the room was cast in the last silver light that bounced off the snow. Natela lay pressed up against him on the narrow bed; they breathed together, in time, with nothing to separate them; and for a while he simply watched her, the lock of hair across her eye, the proud nose, the lines in her forehead, the rise and fall of her breast. He felt a deep peace, and at its limits a new and encroaching fear.
It must be after six. He should get dressed, and eat, and prepare. Collect any messages he might have been left. Show solidarity with Irodi, the staunchest of guides, and respect for Eka and Vano, whose home he had just defiled. In the dark he smiled, a teenager once more in a strange house. He wanted to go nowhere.
Slowly, he left the bed, lifting Natela’s arm and sliding out, and began to dress as quietly as he could. Thick socks, long johns, a thermal shirt.
“You are going?” Her voice was warm with sleep.
“Not yet. Soon.”
“Lie with me.”
“I look like a prospector.”
She didn’t reply, and he got in beside her, his clothes against her skin.
“You have to come back.”
“I’ll come back.”
“I hope your friend is worth this.”
“So do I.”
“Does he know you look for him?”
“No. We fell out. We haven’t spoken in months.”
“Why?”
“One of those things that doesn’t matter.”
For a minute they lay together, not talking.
“Who would look for you?” said Natela at last.
“That’s a good question. Ben would, if he knew.”
“But in London, you are alone?”
Hammer turned on his side and pulled himself closer into her back, feeling the warm skin of her neck against his cheek.
“I’m alone in London. Alone everywhere.”
“Why?”
“How do you mean, why?”
“This is the woman you loved?”
She rolled over to face him, and in the near dark he could see her eyes intently on his. He let out a long breath and thought how best to say it. He had been asked the question often enough, but never before had he needed to give an honest answer, though he knew it so well.
“I guess.”
“That was the last time?”
“The last time what?”
“You loved someone.”
“That was the last time I did a lot of things.”
“How she died?”
In the icy half-light, safe in the warm dark of the bed, Hammer told her, and the telling alone was like a great release.
“We were in Mexico. Do you know Mexico?”
Natela shook her head.
“It’s a hell of a place. I used to go all the time, get out of New York. This time we went trekking in the mountains, a place I knew, and we were a day away from anywhere and Tanya got sick. Really sick, so she couldn’t walk. Horrible. There were no phones and I was terrified. We couldn’t stay but she couldn’t walk. So I carried her, as best I could. I had her on my back, and I walked almost through the night, didn’t see a soul. We got back to town, I found a doctor, woke him up. She died in a car on the way to the city.”
Natela said nothing but reached up and held her hand to his cheek.
“That kind of shut me down, for a while.”
For a minute they lay together, Natela gently stroking the hair behind his ear.
“I hated to tell that story. I got back to New York, and people knew, and all the time I wanted it to go away but every face I saw, there it was. It was my idea to go, my place, my plan. I took her there.” He paused for a moment, let out a slow sigh. “It was a tick. You know a tick? Like a little bug, tiny. Like this. I checked for them when she got sick but it was up in her hair and I didn’t find it. Doctors said it had probably been there for days. The smallest thing. This tiny stupid thing. Anyway. I went home. Got her home. And I just couldn’t be there. So I went to London. Got asked by this guy I hardly knew to do some work for him. That was my first case.”
Natela smoothed the hair on the side of his head and held his cheek in her hand, as if she had something to say that he must hear.
“It made you sick also, I think.”
“Maybe.”
Natela kissed him, and in the rich silence that followed there came a soft knock at the door.
“Diakh?” said Natela, frowning at Hammer in mock alarm.
It was Irodi. Hanging back, he opened the door a crack and said something in Georgian.
“OK,” said Natela, and the door closed. There was worry in her voice. “Someone is here. For you.”
“Koba?”
“Not Koba.”
That was crazy. No one could be here. All Hammer’s anxieties about the plan, the trek to the border, and the chances of success returned.
“Fuck.”
“Who is it?”
“No one good.”
• • •
There were voices below, in intense conversation: Vano’s and another, which Hammer didn’t recognize at first. Vano glanced up with a look of annoyance and carried on remonstrating with the stranger, whose back was to Hammer and who carried on talking in firm, calm tones. As Eka tried to pacify her husband the stranger turned.
“Good evening, Mr. Hammer. You are still on the tourist trail.”
Vekua was there, dressed in a thick black ski jacket and smiling a cold, straight smile. There was something icy in it even by the light of the fire, and it settled in his stomach like a deadweight.
“Elene. Good to see you.”
“Mr. Sukhishvili says there have been enough of my kind in his house. But I am here to help.”
Next to Eka she seemed more than ever pale and lean, a frozen creature finally in her habitat.
“That’s very kind of you. Help who?” said Hammer.
“You.”
“How did you know where I was?”
“I didn’t. Not exactly. The priest in Shenako told me you were here.”
“So how . . .”
“I have come to find your friend.”
Hammer sized her up, wondering what had really brought her here and whether she bought for a moment his shtick. Whether he bought hers.
He prayed that Natela would have the sense to stay upstairs.
“You have? Well, that’s great. I could do with some help.”
“Let us give these people some peace.”
Hammer glanced at Eka, who told him with her eyes that she wanted him to stay. He pulled a chair out. “It’s OK. It’s warm in here. Take a seat.” Vano, when he realized that his home was still not his own, grunted and walked out, leaving a frost behind.
“He says he has had enough of strangers in his house,” said Vekua. “It takes a lot for a Georgian to say this. Who else has been here?”
“Do you know, I don’t know. There was a big party here last night.”
She smiled, in a way that suggested that the pleasantries were over.
“So,” she said. “Why did you come here?”
Hammer couldn’t remember finding anyone so hard to read. His fingers tapped softly on the table. She could be doing her job or preparing to kill him. Perhaps it didn’t matter: if she was genuine, he should tell her everything, and if she wasn’t, she almost certainly knew it all in any case. Except the deal. Whoever she was, she couldn’t be that good.
“I got a lead. He told someone he was coming here.”
“Who was that?”
“I’d rather not say.”
Vekua raised an eyebrow. “They were correct.”
“Really?”
“He was here. Now he is in Russia.”
Despite himself, Hammer felt a kick of hope and something else—a tiredness, a sense of tension releasing after days of tightening. He tried not to show it.
Footsteps sounded softly on the stairs, and although Hammer kept his eyes on Vekua she twisted in her chair to look.
Natela had brushed her hair and put on fresh lipstick. She greeted Eka and waited for Hammer to introduce her. Vekua did the same, but Hammer, for once, couldn’t find the words.
“Another guest?” said Vekua.
“This is a friend of mine.”
“I know who you are. I am Elene Vekua.” She half rose from the table to shake hands, and as she did so said something in Georgian that prompted a wary nod from Natela. She turned to Hammer: “I am familiar with Mrs. Toreli’s case. Of course.”
Natela held cigarettes and a lighter in her hand and put them on the table as she sat. Eka came to the table with a jug of water and another of wine.
“But I didn’t know you knew each other. You came here together?”
“More or less,” said Hammer.
There was silence while Vekua poured water into three glasses.
“We do not need wine this evening,” she said, looking frankly at Hammer and Natela in turn. Her gaze was untiring. “It is good I find you here. I can ask you both.” But the question was to Hammer. “Do you know a man called Dima Zoidze?”
Hammer shook his head. “I don’t think so. No, I don’t.”
From the floor by her side she brought up onto her lap a neat black briefcase, unzipped it, took from a clear plastic folder a small sheaf of photographs, and slid them across the table.
“This man.”
The pictures were of him and Koba: one outside the hotel in Batumi, one in Gori by the bombed flats, another of them leaving Tbilisi two days earlier, all taken from a distance with a good lens. He passed them to Natela, and wondered where this would lead and what it meant. Either he had just gained an ally or the whole thing was about to become complicated. In either case, he feigned more surprise than he felt.
“Koba?”
“His name is not Koba.”
“He drove me here. What’s he done?”
“How do you know him?”
“I asked the hotel for a driver and that’s who they gave me.”
“He is not a driver.”
“Then what is he?”
Vekua waited for Natela to finish and replaced the photographs in the folder, keeping one back.
“He is a colleague. A former colleague. He would not know me. He left the service ten years ago. Now he runs a security company. He provides bodyguards, solves his clients’ problems, finds compromising material on their enemies.”
“Sounds like a competitor.”
“He is not of your caliber, Mr. Hammer. And he does not have your morals. He is not a good man.”
“I’ve had my doubts.”
“We think he did this.” She propped the last photo up on its edge. It showed Koba talking to a soldier while Hammer shielded his eyes against the sun and peered at the destroyed apartment building in Gori.
“He did what?”
“We think he built the bomb, from materials stolen from my service. Then he gave it to rebels from Dagestan. Here. A few miles from this village.”
Hammer thought he was good at spotting a lie but with Vekua it was pointless. Her voice was calm, her thin lips composed. She might have been giving him directions or telling him the time.
“Why?”
“For a client. There are rich men in Georgia who do not want to see the president change. They do not want to lose what they have.”
“Rich men or a rich man?”
“I cannot say.”
Hammer sat back, still shaking his head, wondering whether to mention Iosava.
“When did you find out?”
“I could not tell you. You can see that. I tried to help.”
“How do you know all this?”
“We have been following him for some time. He has made some mistakes. Your friend saw them. So did Toreli.”
Natela shifted on her chair, and Vekua went on.
“When your friend came here, to the mountains, Zoidze’s men followed him and took him. Zoidze called his client on the day it happened to say that he had found the dog that went missing—these were his words—and he would keep it safely.”
“Why not kill him?”
Vekua smiled, in her cool way. “It is not good to kill Englishmen. Or Americans. Russians, OK. Georgians, yes. But if you kill an Englishman, people notice, and foreign police come, and media. You would have come. The situation was too delicate. Too dangerous. So he took him, and made a false trail so no one would look for him.”
“He’s going to let him go?”
“He will not. Probably he planned to kill him when the time will be good. When no one will be watching. In three months, six months it will not look like anything. A body somewhere, a story for it, there is no connection. But now that you are searching for him, he has changed his plan. Today he moved him. Across the border, where no body will be found and no murder can be investigated. Zoidze called his client this morning at ten o’clock to say that the dog was on its way to Makhachkala to be put down. Makhachkala is capital of Dagestan.”
“Then he’s long gone.”
Vekua shook her head, a quick, precise motion.
“No. They are using radio to communicate. Two transmissions have been made from the same place in the last four hours. It is three miles past the border.”
“He might be dead already.”
“He might. They may be waiting for final instruction.” She paused. “It is a good place for them. No one lives there now. Just mountains.”
Three miles across the border. If Vekua was right, Ben was five miles away. But there were so many other possibilities. She was lying. Koba was lying. They were lying together. Not for the first time Hammer felt that he was jumping from one patch of quicksand to another, and sinking slowly all the while.
“And Karlo?” said Natela, sharply, as if the primary question had been unaddressed.
Vekua blinked slowly and turned to her. “We think this man killed your husband as well.”
Hammer felt Natela go tense next to him. “How? He killed himself. You all say it.”
“Maybe he did not make the cut. Maybe someone forced him to make it.”
Natela clasped her hands together on the table until the skin on her knuckles went white.
“It’s all right,” said Hammer, but when he touched her arm she jerked it away. She closed her eyes, her jaw set.
“And you give money to this man,” she said.
Hammer liked his deal with Koba. It was balanced, and there was something to be said for that. A transaction: money for value. He understood it, and his instinct told him that Koba did, too. Everyone might be lying, and the deal could still hold.
In desperation he clung on.
“Well, I was going to. Hundred bucks a day. He wouldn’t take anything off me yet.”
Hammer willed Natela to take the hint, but she just shook her head, furious.
“He kills, he kills again, and you make him rich man.”
It was his fault, after all. He should have briefed her.
“It’s only a hundred bucks.”
But Vekua was looking at him, her straight brow creased, waiting for his explanation. He didn’t know who she was, or what she wanted, and it made her impossible to play against. All he could do was try to keep control.
“All right.”
He took a deep breath, scrambling to work out what new plan might work to his advantage.
“I figured out something wasn’t right with him. With Koba. Whatever his name is. He’d been running around making calls, going missing, leaving and coming back. I confronted him, and he told me where Ben is. No, that’s not true, he told me where he would be. Tonight.”
“You have paid for his release?”
“Something like that.”
“And you meet tonight?”
“We meet tonight. He and I. No one else. Look,” he said, leaning in to Vekua. “All I want is Ben out of there, OK? I don’t care how much it costs or who I pay. You want Koba, right? Zoidze. We each have our prize. So tonight we let my plan play out, and then you can have yours.”
“I will come with you.”
“No, you won’t. I’m going alone.”
“Tell me. Why do you go with him, into Russia? He can call his men, they will bring Webster here.”
“Because, what he told me, they can’t use the radio in Russia.”
“But they are using it. I told you this.”
She had. He had failed to register it.
“Mr. Hammer, you go with him, he will kill you. He is clever, perhaps he will make it seem that you killed your friend, then yourself. In Georgia we say that with one stone you kill two birds.”
“No kidding. We say that, too. He needs me alive to pay the second half of his money.”
Vekua smiled. “Consider. He has one-half money, and happy client. Perfect conclusion.”